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Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting
features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first
GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another
look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been
made. While nothing groundbreaking will be introduced in GNOME 2.22 (compared
to KDE
4.0 at least), this desktop environment does have some moderate changes worth
noting. In this article are eight interesting packages that either have noticeable
changes since GNOME 2.20 or are new to GNOME. This list isn't all-inclusive or ordered in any particular
fashion, but just eight changes that had caught our attention.

Epiphany With WebKit: The big feature coming
to Epiphany, the GNOME web browser, in GNOME 2.22 is the ability to use the WebKit
backend. While most have heard of WebKit by now, if you haven't, WebKit is a popular
(and growing) open-source web browser engine that began as the KHTML library in
the KDE Konqueror browser. WebKit is currently deployed inside numerous Apple
products, integration with the upcoming Qt v4.4 release, and is used by various
open-source web projects. Epiphany has long used Mozilla's Gecko engine, for similar
rendering capabilities to Firefox,
while a WebKit backend is the big feature for Epiphany 2.22. In order to use the
WebKit backend, Epiphany must be built with the --with-engine=webkit
argument. If you are after trying out the WebKit-backed Epiphany, be forewarned
that the Epiphany 2.21.x development packages found in some distribution package
repositories (such as Ubuntu 8.04) are still relying upon
the Gecko engine.

Evince Document Viewing: While not as dramatic
as swapping out a browser's rendering backend, the Evince Document Viewer has
a few improvements. The biggest of these features being Evince now supports
page transition effects when running in the presentation mode. Among these transitions
are a split animation, blinds, box, wipe, dissolve, fade, and push effects. All
of these transitions are done using Cairo. The other new feature for Evince is
a plug-in API so that support for new document types can be added without needing
to rebuild or modify Evince. Evince in GNOME 2.22 will also have some other minor
changes, such as support for links with the mailto: URIs. Originally
planned for GNOME 2.22 was annotations support for Evince, which was a Google
Summer of Code project. The annotations support is for appending notes to a document
and then having the ability to share these notes with anyone else. The Evince
annotations support for PDF files will follow the official reference specification
by Adobe, which makes it possible to read PDF annotations that were created in
another PDF annotator and vice-verse. Unfortunately, this annotation support has
been postponed to GNOME 2.24. While on the topic, other planned features for Evince
in GNOME 2.24 include tile-based rendering, improving the history tracking, and
document thumbnails in the file selector.

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